• OceanLab [#]
• Paul van Dyk [#]
• Armin van Buuren [#] (Thanks to Kalpik for the recc.)
• Gareth Emery [#]

Psst. I left last.fm for … nothing, just left it. Like I left Twitter and Facebook. They are for people with no time and I got plenty, plenty, plenty.

The topics remain unrelated, as always.

First off, music.

3 Doors Down

3 Doors Down

This band is pure awesomeness, rock awesomeness specifically!

Though their latest self-titled album had released a few months ago, I only got them this week and every track on it is splendid and not even one makes me skip to the next! The only other album that I’ve enjoyed so much would be Flipsyde’s We The People. Here’s their Last.fm page if you are interested in trying them out.

However, there is always a favorite no matter how much you like all the tracks on an album and mine were It’s Not My Time and She Don’t Want The World.

Their older album, Away from the Sun was also good, with great tracks like When I’m Gone and Here Without You. Nice music!

Didn’t like the even-older album The Better Life though.

Off to Programming.

Ruby

Ruby Programming Language

I messed around with Ruby a few days. It’s brilliant, and nearly as easy as Python is. But it didn’t fit me so well that I’d shift from Python to it. My prime reason to try it was for seeing how good Ruby On Rails development could be, my interest being sparked by the rave reviews its been getting. It sure is good, web-dev stuff but I’ll go ahead with Django finally.

But doing things in Ruby is sorta easier than in Python. Sort of. But I haven’t poked around much to be sure if it wins over Python or not. Ruby is definitely more Object-Oriented than Python, with every darn thing being an object. With a good editor, ruby files look great and are easy to read as well. Might explore more with it at Project Euler perhaps.

Now for some more KDE4 mixup.

KDE’s Dolphin is a boon for external-storage device users with its neat split screen feature and not to mention the tabbing power. I’d say this is overkill, giving both! And if that were not enough, there’s a button

KDE's Dolphin File Manager

that would launch the terminal below the window in another splitter pane. This power feels good to handle, too good. Ironically for me, its philosophy page says otherwise. Ark, the KDE’s default archive-extract/create program is just not good. It fails at basic tasks and stalls while extracting from split RAR files, but thanks to it am more comfortable with the unrar and tar command line programs now.

Am building Amarok 2 (Alpha 2 – 1.86) as I type this now. Will write about it in a later post, if I manage to get it built and running properly. KTouch is another nice application, for improving your touch-typing skills and am addicted to KBattleShip and KHangMan in my free time, for some educative-arcade fun.

Finally, about my life. (Hey who said all above is for people with no life?!)

Not much is happening at college except for some mild interest of mine rising up for IBM’s TGMC 2008, but I most probably won’t be doing any worthwhile thing in it, I don’t like being forced into Java and accompanying technologies from IBM. This Java thing can form another post actually, haha.

Implementing those OS Job-scheduling algorithms in a preemptive manner in C is a nice practice though the syllabus doesn’t clearly require it. And what is this whole Rational Rose thing, I never get it why designing the construct of a software project is easier this way than hard-coding it down from scratch, I find it too confusing drawing diagrams!

Saw some old Sonic the Hedgehog videos thats been doing some spikes lately, and also saw Hancock and The Dark Knight off which the latter was the most awesome movie ever! Its IMDb rating is justified IMO, with Heath Ledger’s death clearly contributing a lot to it.

Thats all for this syscall of random. *Urgh, goes back to the OS Concepts book*

Album Art:

Here’s the list:

Track Number – Artist – Album – Title

01. ATB – Trilogy Lyrics – Justify
02. ATB – Trilogy Lyrics – Desperate Religion
03. ATB – Trilogy Lyrics – Renegade
05. ATB – Trilogy Lyrics – Stars Come Out
06. ATB – Trilogy Lyrics – Feel Alive
07. ATB – Trilogy Lyrics – Made of Glass
09. ATB – Trilogy Lyrics – These Days
10. ATB – Trilogy Lyrics – Better Give Up
11. ATB – Trilogy Lyrics – Some Things Just Are The Way They Are
12. ATB – Trilogy Lyrics – The Chosen Ones

(Rest tracks on Trilogy – 2 Disc Edition don’t have lyrics, just deep and enjoyable music.)

Download ATB – Trilogy or buy it, worth either way.

Now Transcend has given it a complete looks overhaul and has released the newer Transcend T.sonic 650 players!

Here’s how they look: (Very delicious looking, and curvy compared to my 630!)

If you ask me, its just the same 630 in features, with a 610 style 2-Color OLED screen. All the other features as seen in this Press Release by Transcend are exactly the same as the T.sonic 630 except an additional memory for 10 FM stations. (The 630 has 10 slots, the 650 has 20)

Comes only in 2 GB (The White one) and 4 GB (The Black one) variants.

Transcend’s T.sonic 650 is designed to be ultra portable and easy to use. It slips effortlessly into your pocket or bag, with its measurements of only 75 mm x 31 mm x 13 mm. Weighing in at a mere 30g (with Li-ion battery), the T.sonic 650 is light enough that you may forget it’s in your pocket, and you can even wear it around your neck. Thanks to the ingenuity of Transcend’s designers, you won’t find a single screw on the outer shell of T.sonic 650 to negatively impact the player’s aesthetics. The high-gloss front face is attractive and blends well with any fashion. T.sonic 650 has a brilliant dual-color OLED display that can easily be viewed at any angle, even in broad daylight. The easy-to-read display is also great for singing along with the T.sonic 650’s karaoke-style Lyrics Sync function. To increase ease-of-use and intuitive interface navigation, a convenient 4-way button is built into the face of the T.sonic – making access to your MP3s easier than ever.

A versatile MP3 player, the T.sonic 650 also has a built-in FM radio that can be quickly recorded whenever you hear something you like. Other functions like A-B repeat and variable playback speeds are excellent tools for students and professionals alike, allowing easy review of important class lectures, meetings or foreign language lessons. The one-touch recording function with Voice Activity Detection lets you make high quality gapless voice recordings and personal memos. Above all, the T.sonic 650 is a great music player with support for MP3, WMA, WAV, and even WMA-DRM10 subscription music. With 4GB of storage space, you can easily store up to 1000 of your favorite songs for endless hours of music entertainment. Also provided are seven different equalizer modes to choose from — Normal, POP, Rock, Classical, Jazz, Bass and a special USER EQ, which lets you make personal adjustments to create your own music style.

Product Features

• Supports MP3, WMA, WMA-DRM10 (subscription music) and WAV music formats
• FM Radio with 20 station presets and recording options
• Digital voice recorder with VAD (Voice Activity Detection) for gapless recordings
• Bright dual-color 4-line OLED display with power-saving screen savers
• Variable track playback speeds and A-B repeat for reviewing important parts of songs, meetings, lectures and more
• Displays 13 languages including song title, artist, and synchronized lyrics
• 7 Equalizer effects: Normal, POP, Rock, Classical, Jazz, Bass and USER EQ
• Real Time Clock (RTC) displays local and world times
• Internal rechargeable Li-ion battery provides over 15 hours playback
• Sleep timer can be set to automatically power-off after 15, 30 or 60 minutes
• High-speed USB 2.0 interface with USB flash drive and security functions
• 2 year warranty

T.sonic 650

Visit Transcend’s Website for more information. (Should be available soon)

Click the image to listen to Scatman John’s Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop) song:

You can find the lyrics to this song here.

And no, “scat” here isn’t what your dirty mind might be thinking, its a style of singing.

From Listen’s Website page:

Listen is an audio player written in Python. Thanks to it, you can easily organize your music collections.

It supports many features such as Podcasts management, browse Shoutcast directory.

It provides a direct access to lyrics, last.fm and Wikipedia info.

It intuitively creates play-lists for you by retrieving information from last.fm and what you most frequently listen to.

So you see, its very intelligent at what it is, and also being Python-ic, its easy to add things to it as well.

Install Listen and give it a try atleast!

Here’s a screen-shot from my Listen player:

Now on to the random part, I got a lot of new music, which are: Bjork, Beck, Depeche Mode, Chemical Brothers, The Cardigans, The Cranberries, Deftones, Groove Armada and Lenny Kravitz. Chemical Brothers and Beck are very cool stuff with their sound. I didn’t quite like Bjork, cause its electronic sound is totally weird! Lenny Kravitz and Deftones are great rock stuff and Groove Armada and Depeche Mode are normal electronic music, I didn’t find them so impressive.

In movies, I’ve seen ‘Zodiac‘ and two animated features ‘The Invincible Iron Man‘ and ‘Doctor Strange‘ in the last week. Along with that old ‘Bad Boys‘ movie (The first part) and ‘Oceans 13‘ and ‘Wild Hogs‘. I’ll blog about each of these along the week

Onto Academics, I always end up sleeping during my Data Structures class while the teacher takes those silly Stack, Queue and Linked List ADTs. The only part I try listening properly to is the applications of each. Seriously speaking, Data Structures is of no use to study unless you create the programs for each type of application or at least practice the basic programs. I don’t know how some people manage to pass it without knowing a damn what’s going on in it. OOP is easy but comes with a lot of cryptic definitions (Speaking in the exam’s POV)

Anyway, am now off to finish my records so I can go out later today.

It searches only a few kind of files as of now, but then, Google Desktop never was the best in searching. But it sure gives a handy application to search the web quickly.

Download as [ DEB ] or [ RPM ]

Or if you wish to add Google’s Linux Software repository to your OS, look here.

But the thing with me is, I never really needed a search in my daily OS use. Over the past five years I’ve learned how to manage your files side by side as I work. Sure it was difficult at first, but when some friend of yours dumps about 500 songs on your HDD, you realize how painful tagging is. Yeah, I tagged them all manually (Right Click – Properties, Google for info) on Windows and then after I finished the 3 day work and arranged them well, with Album Art and all, I discovered that MusicBrainz did the same. Only, automatically. Haha, I felt like deleting the entire collection after I discovered the software.

It might be that I don’t really keep a lot of files, like documents and all. And even if I do, not for a long time. The only thing I start the Search applet or software of an OS is to find a system file or something hidden deep under the User Profile folders. But otherwise, I always know where my files are and never really have hassles searching them out.

Sorting music is now much easier, thanks to both Amarok and Windows Media Player 11 coming with automatic file tagging and Album Art downloads. My music folder is arranged in the Artist – Album – Files and Art way. Like the breadcrumb view below:

And though its arranged in such a way, its still obsolete cause these modern player libraries are beautifully sorted and very easy to use if your files are well tagged.

I don’t think anyone these days actually goes through the File Explorer and selects something to play. Its way easier in a library or a manager, can be sorted in a hundred different ways and all your files are accessible from your player itself, thus making playlists from them a cake.

So what am I getting at? Nothing, just saying that once tagged and categorized, your files are way easier to navigate through. But don’t categorize like /home/name/Documents/Office/June1 and /home/name/Documents/Office/June2 and so on. That’s just stupid and makes it more difficult to browse through. Instead just stop at the Office sub category and dump all files with proper descriptive names in it.

No one really listens to all this crap but if you actually keep categorizing and spending that extra few seconds in placing the saved file in the right folder with the right name, it makes retrieval way easier, and completely reduces your need on the search module of the OS which usually gives you a hard and dumb time searching. I mean, how innovative can a search get and be helpful to you when you simply don’t know what and where you seek.

And after the long off-topic blabber, I just wanna say that this GDS tool is quite heavy, just like Beagle is.

You can preview all 12 tracks at Last.fm’s Linkin Park Minutes To Midnight page.

Here’s the official track list from their site (With my views on each) :

• 1. Wake (1:40)

An intro. Worst of all 3 Linkin Park albums. Though the instrumental is as great as always, being Linkin Park themselves at it, the vinyl scratching sound gets me, its bloody irritating. (2.5/5)

• 2. Given Up (3:10)

A hard track. Hard cause rest stuff is soft. This one could go a hit on music channels but it just isn’t a good deep song like old Linkin Park, its more like their unfathomably-popular One Step Closer kind of hard which makes no sense at all. A good track never the less, catchy in parts. (3/5)

• 3. Leave Out All The Rest (3:18)

The best song you’ll find on the album. This song is very very emotive and well sung by Chester, and rules the entire album. Its still different however, from all old Linkin Park stuff, cause its mostly slow and other things like that, but still, you would definitely like this one if you liked the mood of Numb, In The End, etc. (5/5) (My favorite)

• 4. Bleed It Out (2:54)

A very cool song. Catchy, fast and everything nice. It will give you a feel of Hybrid Theory and Meteora in parts and the addition of chorus to the song does add a great deal of energy to it too! (4.5/5)

• 5. Shadow Of The Day (4:50)

I had to check if I wasn’t accidentally playing “The Postal Service” for this one. The track has good music, nice emotions and I just love the way Chester manages to add so much to just the word “Sun”. Nice track to set on repeat IMO. (4/5)

• 6. What I’ve Done (3:25)

You’ve heard this single before and you’ve loved it or hated it. But this is the second best track on the album and yet another favorite of mine. It didn’t top the Modern Rock Charts for no reason at all. (5/5)

• 7. Hands Held High (3:53)

There are some pretty deep and emotive verses in this one, but though its a full rap song sung by Mike most of the part, it lacks the good old Hip-Hop tune which goes well with his rap. The music’s bad, the lyrics good. (3.5/5)

• 8. No More Sorrow (3:38)

You’ll definitely love the guitars in this one and the drums at the beginning. The song has a political feel to it, and its yet another song you can find yourself humming to, or screaming to in some cases. Again a nice track to keep on repeat. (4/5)

• 9. Valentine’s Day (3:15)

A slow, soft, poppy track that makes you sleep till the end where the loud chorus wakes you up and you go “Hey! This is nice .. but only in the end!”. This song could go good on radio and sorts but nothing that you’d like to repeatedly listen to. (3/5)

• 10. In Between (3:14)

Once you hear this, you figure if Linkin Park has a new singer. No. Its Mike Shinoda rapping singing. Yeah, singing. Slowly progressing track and the music just doesn’t fit with his mostly bad singing. He sure raps a lot better than he sings. But the song has a very good lyrical depth to it. (3.5/5)

• 11. In Pieces (3:37)

It sounded like “The Postal Service” again to me. This time I really had to wait for Chester to start his voice to confirm otherwise. But the song, though another slow style thats predominant on this album, has a good feeling to it and has a small guitar solo in near end which sounds really awesome. (4/5)

• 12. The Little Things Give You Away (6:23)

Mostly a guitar solo, this is a wonderful track except at the ending. Each part of the music will bring out a different emotion in you, which is what’s wonderful about this track. The bad part is, at the end, on headphones, Mike sings into one side of the headphone and Chester on the other. Simultaneously. Eeek, that’s a bad experience. (4/5)

Overall rating – (3.5/5)

Your rating: [ratings]

[Worth giving a try before you buy but for Linkin Park fans, it is a must isn't it?]

• 1. Wake (1:40) [Preview] [Instrumental Intro .. No Lyrics]
• 2. Given Up Lyrics (3:10) [Preview]
• 3. Leave Out All The Rest Lyrics (3:18) [Preview]
• 4. Bleed It Out Lyrics (2:54) [Preview]
• 5. Shadow Of The Day Lyrics (4:50) [Preview]
• 6. What I’ve Done Lyrics (3:25) [Preview]
• 7. Hands Held High Lyrics (3:53) [Preview]
• 8. No More Sorrow Lyrics (3:38) [Preview]
• 9. Valentine’s Day Lyrics (3:15) [Preview]
• 10. In Between Lyrics (3:14) [Preview]
• 11. In Pieces Lyrics (3:37) [Preview]
• 12. The Little Things Give You Away Lyrics (6:23) [Preview]